"Buy Somethin' Will Ya!"

A Day in the Life in Animal Crossing: New Leaf

Being a mayor is tough. In my small village of Hobbiton, I do all the landscaping, I check in on my villagers and do chores their chores, and I fund all of my public works projects.

And as the sole donor to the museum uptown, I also have to hunt for fossils. Before I can do that, though, I need to make a quick trip to the local supermarket, because after smashing every rock in the village to uncover pill bugs and a couple coins, my shovel broke!

My trip to the Nookling’s shop is one of necessity, but as I enter, I’m suddenly in the mood to shop around. There’s a stereo system in the back corner that catches my eye, wallpaper that might work nicely in my kitchen, and some medicine that would be nice to have in case of a bee attack. I don’t know why I spent ten minutes inspecting everything in Timmy and Tommy’s T&T Mart. Maybe it was the inviting personalities of the young tanooki twins that operate the store or the assortment of goods available for purchase. Most likely, though, it was the cool bossa nova playing over the loudspeakers.

While music has been practiced for its ability to elevate worker synergy since ancient times, it was the company Muzak that first capitalized on piping soothing music into workplaces and retail spaces in 1934. Since then, Muzak has become infamous for creating “elevator music,” a genre of easy-listening music that scores the background of many commercial settings. Bossa nova, as illustrated in Animal Crossing: New Leaf, is commonly associated with Muzak.

In this essay, I want to look at the origins of both the Muzak company and the bossa nova movement. I am particularly interested in exploring how the rise of bossa nova situated the genre for its near-ubiquitous use in elevator music and commercial spaces. In the end, I will explain the trajectory of bossa nova from its origins to its use as a musical shorthand for commerce in video games.

Elevator Music: The Soundtrack of Consumerism

The company that would become Muzak was founded by electrical engineer George Owen Squier. Before becoming Chief Signal Officer during World War I, Squier devised a system in which living trees could be used as antennae to transmit radio signals. He is also credited with inventing telephony multiplexing in 1910, a process through which multiple radio signals could share a single telephone wire before being dispersed to their respective outputs. Squier founded Wired Radio, a sort of subscription service that piped music to homes, in 1922 as radio’s consumer-base surged and radio exploded into everyday life.1 Wired Radio was rebranded as Muzak in 1934, inspired by the commercial success of George Eastman’s Kodak camera company.

As wireless radio became more accessible in the residential market, Muzak shifted its focus to department stores, hotels, and restaurants. In these settings, Muzak pioneered the field of audio architecture, programming music to fit specific audiences and settings. By the forties, Muzak programmed music to fit what it dubbed the Stimulus Progression, “which held that most workers would be more productive if they were exposed to music of gradually increasing intensity, in fifteenminute [sic] cycles.”2 Stimulus progressions generally begin with groggy, placid tunes before moving into more upbeat tracks as workers’ coffee kicked in. The image below is an advertisement for Muzak depicting a woman whose mood progressively brightens throughout a stimulus progression.

From its inception until the 1980s, Muzak’s programming mainly featured dull arrangements of popular music (typically jazz) performed by studio orchestras along with similarly unassuming tracks commissioned from popular musicians. Particularly in the ‘40s and ‘50s, Muzak shaped and popularized the genre of music that came to be known as easy-listening, even becoming a metonym for the genre (like Band-Aid and Styrofoam).

Below is the tune “At Seventeen” from the Muzak Archive’s The Mall Tales Volume 1.

"At Seventeen"

Following a period in which Muzak’s programming moved farther and farther away from popular music tastes, the company began programming popular vocal music after merging with competitor Yesco in 1986. It was at this time that Muzak made a shift from instrumental background music to vocal foreground music. Muzak’s product lines would eventually become “barely distinguishable from existing FM radio stations.”3 After some questionable bankruptcies, restructures, and a failed merger with its competitor DMX, Muzak was acquired by Mood Media in 2011 (along with DMX). Mood Media provides its clients with a variety of tools to regulate consumer engagement including in-store signage and advertisements, scents, audio messages, and curated music playlists.

The mood regulation of Muzak playlists has been co-opted by modern streaming services, too. Music platforms like Pandora, Apple Music, and Spotify curate mixes to fit certain vibes. Apple Music (my platform of choice) makes use of an algorithm that generates a number of “radio” stations named for music-listening moods including “Chill,” “Get Up!” and “Heartbreak.”4 Critics of these platforms note the deleterious effects they have on the music industry by reducing the efficacy of labels and poorly compensating artists. At the same time, the end result of these mood-based playlists places nearly all music under the Muzak umbrella, transforming all music into “emotional wallpaper.”5

Muzak in the Background

From its adoption in office and commercial spaces, Muzak was primarily in the business of mood regulation. Described by film musicologist Claudia Gorbman, Muzak’s easy-listening music is meant to reduce “the displeasure engendered by the economic tensions of shopping and the physical fear of dentists’ drills,”6 to help “the consumer buy, the patient relax, the worker work; its goal is to render the individual an untroublesome social subject.”7 In fact, both Owen and Lanza purport Muzak’s colloquial reputation as “elevator music” is owed to its probable use “in early skyscrapers to make people feel less nervous about stepping into a contrivance that looked like a death trap.”8

Muzak’s music programming is designed for the background. As background, easy-listening music is not meant to be attended to, but “something you hear without listening.”9 Easy-listening is, in essence, the music of mood. It is meant to register on the subconscious without the need for interpretation. Joseph Lanza explains that Muzak “shifts music from figure to ground, to encourage peripheral hearing.”10 In gestalt psychology, the terms “figure” and “ground” are quintessential to perception. A figure—the object of our attention—is understood in reference to the ground over which we perceive it. The text of a book contrasts with the page on which it is printed so it can more easily be read. We know the page is there, but it exists in the background. We don’t need to know anything about the page to understand the text.11

This figure-ground relationship is key to Muzak. Perhaps ironically, listening to music is not the goal of easy-listening, but to linger in the background as we attend to other things. Ludomusicologist Michiel Kamp argues that this kind of background hearing is “so understanding that no explanation is necessary.”12 As shoppers, we know there is music playing over the loudspeakers, but we don’t need to listen to it to know why Muzak exists as the ground over which other activities—work, shopping, coffeeshop chit-chat—can be attended to.

A Brief History of Bossa Nova

In essence, bossa nova is characterized as a mixture of Brazilian samba and American jazz. Described by Chris McGowan and Ricardo Pessanha,

Bossa nova was a new type of samba in which the genre’s rhythmic complexity had been pared down to its bare essentials, transformed into a different kind of beat. It was full of unusual harmonies and syncopations, all expressed with a sophisticated simplicity. . . This “new fashion” or “new way” . . . of singing, playing, and arranging songs was born in Rio de Janeiro in the mid-1950s.13

Even more, Bryan McCann and Irna Priore argue bossa nova’s flavor is owed primarily to its rhythmic character—its batida de violão (guitar beat)—developed by guitarist and singer João Gilberto.14

Perhaps the earliest catalyst in the development of the bossa nova movement came in 1956 with the stage play Orfeu da Conceição (Orpheus of the Conception), written by Vinícius de Moraes with music by Tom Jobim based on the Orpheus/Eurydice myth. Jobim and de Moraes would become frequent collaborators, writing the song “Chega de Saudade” in 1957. Although Elizeth Cardoso’s performance of the song for the 1958 album Canção do Amor Demais is generally considered the first recording of bossa nova, it was João Gilberto’s rendition on the album Chega de Saudade (1959) that received bossa nova’s first major commercial success and began to truly define the bossa style.15 Together, de Moraes, Jobim, and Gilberto would go on to become what McCann dubs the “bossa nova triumvirate.”16

It was the same year that Orfeu da Conceição was adapted into the film Orfeu Negro (Black Orpheus) by French director Marcel Camus using music by Jobim and Luiz Bonfá. Black Orpheus won the Palme d’Or (the highest prize) at the Cannes Film Festival and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1959, and “went on to become a surprise success in the United States,”17 launching the cool sounds of bossa nova into the global spotlight.

By 1962, bossa had been fully exported to the United States when Carnegie Hall hosted a bossa nova festival featuring the triumvirate (Jobim, de Moraes, and Gilberto), Bonfá, Sérgio Mendez, and American saxophonist Stan Getz, among others. Two years later, Gilberto and Getz released their first duo album Getz/Gilberto (1964) which included the massively popular “Garota de Ipanema” (“The Girl from Ipanema”) written by Jobim and de Moraes. Getz/Gilberto is highly regarded as the most influential (and best known) bossa nova album, with “The Girl from Ipanema” quickly becoming a jazz standard. Much of the album’s success is due to the participation of Astrud Gilberto, whose voice “provided the ineffable allure that made the album irresistible” and “enabled it to cross over to pop success.”18

"The Girl from Ipanema"

A Bossa Nova for the American Middle Class

The global breakout of bossa in the early 1960s coincided with a wave of American consumerism following the Second World War. Consumer-based societies were “championed as the bright future to which the ravaged economies must direct themselves.”19 Magazines and the increasingly-accessible television promoted consumption and the growing affluence of the middle class added more fuel to the consumer frenzy. The retail space grew astronomically and Muzak’s market was larger than ever. For Muzak programmers capitalizing on both the consumer and bossa movements, the cool restraint and popularity of the bossa nova made the style ideal background music. While other cool genres filled Muzak playlists, bossa nova “acquired . . . connotations as the archetypal ‘background’ muzak of airport lounges and shopping malls[.]”20

The most well-known bossa, “The Girl from Ipanema” may well be the most well-known Muzak arrangement. When Muzak merged with Yesco in 1986, however, it gradually left behind its elevator music-style arrangements in favor of popular vocal music. Many retail spaces in the last three decades have used Muzak playlists that are nearly indistinguishable from radio programming (or the “chill” playlists of popular streaming services).21 Even so, the cultural connection between retail spaces and bossa had already been cemented in the public imagination.

John Landis was the first to use “The Girl from Ipanema” to poke fun at elevator music in his 1980 film The Blues Brothers. Landis would use “The Girl from Ipanema” as an in-joke for any scene taking place in an elevator going forward, and bossa nova has since been used for similar scenes in films and TV series like Catch Me if You Can (2002), The Matrix Reloaded (2003) and Severance (2022–). Dreamworks Animation’s Shrek (2001) even uses an easy-listening bossa nova as the eponymous ogre and his companion Donkey enter a seemingly-abandoned spoof of Disneyland.

Because of its historical placement and its appearances in Hollywood scores, bossa nova is inextricably linked to the aesthetics of Muzak. It has become shorthand for commercial settings, corporate ambience, and the sonic wallpaper of American consumer culture.

"Buy Somethin' Will Ya!" — Bossa Nova in the Background of Video Games

Since at least Super Mario Bros. (1986) and its calypso-tinged “Ground Theme,”22 video games (and Nintendo games in particular) have been indebted to the grooves of Latin and Caribbean music to provide rhythmic drive and excitement.23 Because of associations with the sandy beaches of Rio de Janeiro and the Caribbean, Latin music most often accompanies coastal game levels or areas. In fact, video game composers Koji Kondo and Nobuo Uematsu have almost exclusively scored beach levels with bossa nova within the Super Mario (1985–) and Final Fantasy (1987–) series, respectively.24

In the introduction to this essay, I noted the bossa nova that plays while shopping at T&T Mart in Animal Crossing: New Leaf. Other games in the Animal Crossing series use bossa in similar settings, including the Able Sisters’s clothing store and portions of music heard in the Dodo Airlines boarding area in New Horizons (2020). The “Girl from Ipanema”/Muzak association is so strong that bossa has become the predominant sound accompanying commercial settings in video games, and can be heard in the Poké Marts of Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver (2009), the “Shopping in Wakeport” cue in Mario & Luigi: Dream Team (2013), and the MTT Resort hotel in Undertale (2015).

Unlike in Hollywood films, however, bossa is not generally utilized for comedic/ironic effect in video games,25 but rather to appeal to a sense of consumerist nostalgia and to further Muzak’s original mission to provide a soothing sonic architecture. In this way, the easy-listening connotations of bossa allow shop themes to cross out of the realm of background hearing. Video game Muzak may at various times play into any of the four modes of hearing outlined by Michiel Kamp: background, aesthetic, ludic, and semiotic.26

As background, the T&T Mart bossa nova barely registers on our conscience, yet puts us in the mood to shop. It can move into the realm of the aesthetic when it causes us to put the controller down for a second, recognize it as Muzak, or vibe out to the cool bossa nova. It becomes ludic (playful) when we play along to the music and, in a state of “childlike glee,”27 make believe that we are shopping in a store with piped-in music. Lastly, through the associations of Muzak and Hollywood, bossa acts within a game’s semiotic system, musically signaling commerce.

Video Game Shops outside the Magic Circle

Perhaps paradoxically, one of the most famous pieces of video game music does not appear in a video game. Preinstalled on the Wii console came the Wii Shop Channel, an online service operating from 2006–2019 that enabled Wii owners to browse, purchase, and download digital games. As a real marketplace, the Wii Shop Channel does not fit within Johan Huizinga’s “magic circle,” a concept adopted by video game theorists which describes the boundary between game worlds and the real world.28 It should go without saying, but the Wii Shop Channel is not a game.

Yet it functions within the same frame of understanding as fictional video game shops. Borrowing the term from Erving Goffman, Mia Consalvo describes frames in terms of their use to “organize our activity and structure our experiences.”29 Existing in the same commercial frame, we understand the T&T Mart and the Wii Shop Channel as digital marketplaces, while each deals in currency with varying degrees of realness. The fact that we use a fictional currency in Animal Crossing: New Leaf keys players into the make-believe nature of the store. The Wii Shop Channel, on the other hand, operated with a system of Wii Points—a digital currency that anticipated the much-loathed rise of microtransactions.

In addition to all the default Wii console music, the Wii Shop Channel theme was written by Kazumi Totaka, the voice of Yoshi and lead composer/sound director for the Animal Crossing series.30 The music is expectedly a bossa nova and its instrumentation Muzak. At the same time, it complicates both genres. Like the Muzak arrangements of the 1980s and before, the Wii Shop Channel removes the bossa nova from its original contexts. Totaka’s bossa does not closely resemble Gilberto’s batida, nor does it have the same poetry of de Moraes. At the same time, the Wii Shop Channel cannot be heard as authentic Muzak—it’s significantly foregrounded and carries a self-aware playfulness.

Rather, the Wii Shop Channel Muzak plays with common musical signifiers in video games. Up to the point the online marketplace launched, bossa nova was already a well-established symbol for real- and game-world commerce. Even The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, a high-fantasy with a medieval setting, plays with a faux bossa nova beat in its shops.31 We’ve seen, too, how bossa nova was positioned historically to become Muzak in the real world. As such, Totaka’s music for the Wii Shop Channel stands as a representative of both the real and virtual consumer worlds.

Conclusion

Bossa nova’s path from its early performances by the bossa triumvirate to virtual shops shows how its cool, easy-going style slowly became one of the defining sounds of everyday consumer life. Through Muzak, it was reshaped into musical architecture—soft, functional, and quietly persuasive. Video games pick up this shorthand, treating bossa not just as pleasant ambience but as a musical symbol. In video games, bossa nova generally tells us that we’re entering a space meant for making purchases and spending too much time at the T&T Mart. It also becomes something we can play along to while we check the prices of shovels and slingshots.

"Okay, that's all the time I've got. I've gotta get back to playing Animal Crossing: New Leaf on my Nintendo 3DS." - Reggie Fils-Aimé (former President of Nintendo of America)

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Ludography

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• AlphaDream and Good-Feel. Mario & Luigi: Dream Team. Nintendo 3DS. Music by Yoko Shinomura. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2013.
• Fox, Toby. Undertale. OS X and Windows. Music by Toby Fox. Boston: Toby Fox, 2015.
• Game Freak. Pokémon HeartGold and SoulSilver. Nintendo DS. Music by Go Ichinose, Shota Kageyama, Hitomi Sato, Junichi Masuda, and Takuto Kitsuta. Tokyo: The Pokémon Company; Kyoto: Nintendo, 2009.
• Nintendo EAD. Animal Crossing: New Leaf. Nintendo 3DS. Music by Manaka Kataoka, Atsuko Asahi, and Kazumi Totaka. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2012.
• Nintendo EAD Tokyo. Super Mario 3D World. Wii U. Music by Mahito Yokota, Toru Minegishi, Koji Kondo, and Yasuaki Iwata. Kyoto: Nintendo: 2013.
• Nintendo EPD. Miitomo. iOS and Android. Music by Maasa Miyoshi. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2016. Discontinued in 2018.
• Nintendo R&D4. Super Mario Bros. Nintendo Entertainment System and Arcade. Music by Koji Kondo. Kyoto: Nintendo, 1986.
• ———. Super Mario Bros. 3. Nintendo Entertainment System. Music by Koji Kondo. Kyoto: Nintendo, 1988.
• Nintendo Special Planning and Development. Wii Shop Channel. Wii. Music by Kazumi Totaka. Kyoto: Nintendo, 2006.
• Square. Final Fantasy VII. PlayStation. Music by Nobuo Uematsu. Tokyo: Square; Foster City, CA: Sony Computer Entertainment, 1997.